Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The system is configured with 4 2TB drives and 3 1TB drives. As you can see from the screenshot and video we are at about half capacity right now so everything is in a "green" status. At our current growth in data consumption I would expect that the next time we provide an update we will be showing you again the way the DroboElite adds more capacity, but in that review we will pay special attention to any time effect having so much data will cause. How soon will our Drobo be available and how good is the performance while it rebalances all the data?

George Crump, Senior Analyst

We have the DroboElite set for dual drive redundancy so that if a single drive fails we are in a fully protected state while the system rebuilds. For us this is critical since there are times where the whole office is on the road and if we had a drive failure it may be a few days before the drive is replaced. Another scenario where dual drive redundancy might come in handy is if you fill up the DroboElite with lower capacity drives and need to upgrade to drives of higher capacity. You can swap drives out without being exposed as the new drive is integrated into the system. For the cost of drives, dual drive redundancy is the only way to go.

From a production use standpoint the system stores all of our content creation efforts, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts and white papers. Right now the Drobo is hosting our Nasuni Cloud enabled Filer volume and we are using the Nasuni to access all of this data. It also contains our other "production" data in our test lab. Most of the VMs in the lab environment are launched from one of several DroboElite volumes. Finally we use the DroboElite to store backups of both lab and production server boot drives.

We have leveraged the shared access of the DroboElite to move VMs to different hosts. While this is not a live migration with VMware Fusion it is a very quick way to bring a VM online on a different host.

From a backup perspective all the content data is automatically being snapshotted to the cloud via the Nasuni Filer software. We are backing up the rest of the DroboElite with a UniTrends 711 backup appliance, which has plenty of capacity to hold backups of all of the organization's data.

Storage Switzerland’s Take

Production storage is something you want to just work and the DroboElite allows us to keep focused on what is important to our business; research, creating content and testing equipment in the lab. Any time spent managing storage is time that we don’t spend doing what is important to the business. The Data Robotics DroboElite allows us to stay focused on the important task for our business and our readers.